Painted Scenes Research Articles

Public Pages: Reading Along the Latin American Streetscape by Marcy Schwartz

Reviewed by: Public Pages: Reading Along the Latin American Streetscape by Marcy Schwartz Craig Epplin Schwartz, Marcy. Public Pages: Reading Along the Latin American Streetscape. U of Texas P, 2018. 304 pp. Toward the end of Public Pages, Marcy Schwartz describes a painting by Antonio Berni in which a girl teaches several boys to read. More than a painting, Juanito Laguna aprende a leer incorporates bits of garbage into a layered canvas. The complexity of its assemblage, made visible on the surface of the work, mirrors the nature of the scene represented: learning to read is never a simple act, particularly in contexts riven by social divisions, and the precariousness of the boys’ and the girl’s economic situation is made clear in both figurative depiction and material support. Painting scenes set in the Buenos Aires slums, Berni “uses the very materials that residents rely on to build their makeshift homes” (228), and thus here he connects reading to this same material reality. Schwartz presents this work as a reflection of an ethics of reading as an everyday act, coextensive with the materiality of daily life. [End Page 1071] A reflection on Berni stands as a fitting conclusion to Schwartz’s detailed, multifaceted analyses of recent projects that seek to cultivate public spaces of reading in Latin American cities. Two main strands run through this study. The first involves a number of close readings of the literary print production, most often comprising very brief texts, that one can encounter in the public spaces of large Latin American cities today. The second traces in detail the institutional mechanisms that foment, organize, and distribute this literature. The result is a layered illustration of the places of literature in Latin America—indeed, of the ways in which literature, both its aesthetic interior and its institutional exterior, contributes to a sense of place in cities like Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago de Chile, and São Paulo. As such, the reader gains an understanding of a selective but important swath of literature in contemporary Latin American urban life, framed within the political and economic forces shaping these writings. Many of the projects that Schwartz analyzes are undertaken at the municipal level, underwritten by the local administrations of large cities, usually national capitals. Some receive funding from corporations or national ministries of culture. Two of them seek recognition within the framework of cultural governance at the international level (UNESCO). But others operate at a less official level: at the scale of neighborhood associations or even smaller. These very diverse projects share a common notion of literature: “Literature as conceived, produced, and distributed by these programs has intrinsic poetic and humanistic value” (3). That is, literature is not seen here as a means to acquire skills or prepare for a specific aim. It is neither a means to functional literacy, as it was, for example, in the Cuban and Nicaraguan literacy campaigns that followed political revolution in those countries, nor a tool for promoting a specific political consciousness: “These programs invest in reading for enjoyment that prompts social interaction to construct new collective urban imaginaries” (3). One might object, rightly, that there is nothing apolitical about this description. Indeed, the conviction shared by the projects Schwartz analyzes is that reading in public is an activity that should be promoted because it generates a healthy citizenry—and, of course, the way in which one defines the health of the citizen is itself a political matter. That said, these projects, as Schwartz outlines in her introduction, are not built on the suppositions that guide the classic understanding of the public sphere. That is, they do not conceive of a clean separation between public and private wherein literature comprises a sort of preparation for entering public debate. Some of them do grapple with the legacy of hierarchy, colonial in its origins, inherent in the Latin American ciudad letrada. But the political and economic actors supporting these public reading projects are so diverse and dedicated to such different visions of society that we are left to wonder how to conceive of commonalities among them, beyond their support for reading in public space. One of the virtues of Public Pages is...

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

Más que flores. Novedades sobre la trayectoria y producción artística del pintor José Romá (Valencia, 1784-1852)

El objetivo del presente artículo es contribuir al conocimiento de la trayectoria académica y de la producción artística de José Romá. Se trata de un importante artista de la primera mitad del siglo XIX, poco conocida en la actualidad, principalmente por sus lienzos de flores. Este estudio da a conocer nuevas pruebas documentales que demuestran sus aspiraciones a convertirse en “pintor de Historia”; aporta información sobre su formación y su variada actividad pictórica e incluye un análisis de una composición de flores hasta ahora desconocida.

Teaching Africa in World History: Painting Scenes, Performing Stories, Creating Conversations

Teaching Africa in World History: Painting Scenes, Performing Stories, Creating Conversations

Tactile reproduction of paintings: the experience of the Department of Industrial Engineering of Florence

Within the T-VedO project, financed by Tuscany Region, the Reverse Engineering and Virtual Prototyping Lab team of the Department of Industrial Engineering of Florence (Italy) developed a number of methods for the semiautomatic generation of digital 2.5D models starting from paintings. Once such models are prototyped, they can be used to enhance visually impaired people tactile experience of artworks. Such methods, combined into a systematic procedure, allow to solve most of the typical problems arising when dealing with artistic representation of a painted scene. The present paper presents both an overview of the proposed procedure, including most recent updates, and the results obtained for a selected number of artworks of the Florentine Renaissance.

Portraiture in Indian Miniature Paintings

The art of miniature painting in India traces its origin to the Buddhist manuscript Illustrations of the Pala period in Nepal and Eastern part of India in the 8th to 11th century. The Jain manuscripts in Gujrat and Rajasthan, as early as 11th century, also point towards a practice of such illustrations. These manuscripts, apart from portraying religious literature, also covered wide ranging topics such as medicine, astrology, etc. They were profusely illustrated, and were mostly inscribed on palm leaves. Apart from serving as important treatises, they were widely used as gifts during royal marriages and accessions. However, the Mughal Rule in India brought a certain degree of sophistication, refinement and finesse to this form of art. Under successive Mughal Rulers, the art of miniature painting reached its zenith. While Babur and Humayun, who were great lovers of art and literature, could not build proper ateliers during their reigns due to their frequent military campaigns and conflicts, they were responsible for bringing to India two versatile artists, Abdus Samad and Mir Sayed Ali from the Safavid Persian Court-whose works would have significant impact on the art of miniature paintings in the Mughal Courts. Humayun’s successors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan built some of the most significant ateliers under their rules, and some of the preeminent miniature artists like Basavan, Manohar, Bichitar, Ustad Mansur, Balchand and Murad flourished under their patronage. Some very significant works like Baburnama, Akbarnama, Razamnama, etc. were also commissioned by the early Mughal Emperors. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, the miniature painting scene shifted to the Rajput Courts in Rajasthan and the Hill States in Northern India. Various important Schools of painting –like the Mewar, Marwar, Jaipur, Hadoti, Kangra, Basholi, and Garhwal – Schools, to name a few, started flourishing under their respective rulers. While the Mughal influence still prevailed, yet each school had its own distinctive characteristic and feature. The subjects of these paintings and manuscripts ranged from religious literature, court scenes, royal processions, flora and fauna, textiles, jewelry to elaborate equestrian and hunting scenes. However, the most riveting and captivating depictions were in the form of elaborate and brilliant portraits of the rulers, their nobles and courtiers, which not only throw light on their magnificent reigns, but also open a window to the culture, tradition and practices of those times. This essay makes an attempt to study the fine art of portraiture in miniature paintings in the various Mughal, Provincial and Rajput Courts to bring out their historical and cultural significance.

Magic art, folklore, and rural tales in Le Pouldu: André Breton, Paul Gauguin, and Charles Filiger

Surrealist art and writing are usually viewed in the context of the modern urban space, but this article coordinates a series of poetic, novelistic, and painted scenes in a rural context to argue for an alternative version of the movement as one concerned with geographical, philosophical, and epistemological medieval stereotypes. These are broached by means of three original theses: that Paul Gauguin’s painting had a particular and, till now, unremarked resonance among the later Surrealists; that Brittany took on a privileged status in the movement in the early 1950s; and that an interest in esotericism was not born in the 1940s in Surrealism, as is commonly imagined, but earlier, in the mid-1930s. These proposals are developed initially through close examination of the first but mainly the final part of André Breton’s book L’Amour fou (Mad Love, 1937), especially its evocation of folk tales and pagan legends through its citation of Cinderella (1697), Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth (1917), and David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922). From here, the argument is made that historical and personal events in and close to Le Pouldu that are related in Mad Love, which led Breton to view that southern part of Brittany as enchanted, amplified and inflected Surrealism’s interest in Gauguin and the region in the 1950s. I also claim that this understanding on Breton’s part is indissociable from his collecting habits of the later period, when he acquired several works by Gauguin’s contemporary, the artist Charles Filiger. Ultimately, I use field research in Le Pouldu and close examination of Gauguin’s paintings of the region to argue for Breton’s intimacy with that location and its artists, which been overlooked until now, understood through the imagined pagan past of the terrain, and experienced in an enchanted present.

Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao

Reviewed by: Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao Xing Fan CHINATOWN OPERA THEATER IN NORTH AMERICA. By Nancy Yunhwa Rao. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 415 pp. Paperback, $29.95. In an engaging manifesto, Nancy Yunhwa Rao states that to chronicle the history of Chinatown theatres "is to challenge the invisibility of opera performers, to hear and watch them through the words left by its fans, to reimagine it in its full richness and complexity, to relocate Chinese opera theater in both local communities and transnational circuits, to reconstruct its image, and to build a bridge between the past and the present" (p. 320). Chinatown Opera Theater in North America is a thorough success in fulfilling these tasks. Rao examines Cantonese opera in North American Chinatowns during the 1920s at the intersection of theatre history, North American music history, diasporatic cultural studies, gender studies, media studies, and ethnomusicology. This book is an invaluable source for educators, students, and general readers. Rao constructs a five-part narrative. Part 1 includes three chapters, featuring the social, cultural, and political context of Chinatown theatre. In chapter 1, she weaves a multi-layered background for the golden period of Chinatown theatre during the 1920s: the national histories on both sides of the Pacific; the increasingly diversified musical and entertainment milieu of cosmopolitan cities as transnational contact zones in both southern China and North America; and the intricate connections between theatre as cultural capital and Chinese communities' transnational commerce and growing social power. In chapter 2, Rao offers a survey of Chinatown theatre in the context of the immigration policies in the United States from the open immigration policy of the 1850s to the increasingly stringent exclusionary laws during the 1880s, and then to the admission of Chinese performers, based on popular demand, during the early [End Page 502] 1920s. Chapter 3 focuses on the Mandarin Theatre's harrowing fight for legitimacy during 1923–1925. Rao depicts this as an integral part of the Mandarin Theatre's everyday life: dealing with and surviving immigration regulations. Part 2 includes two chapters on Cantonese opera's genre-specific practices. In chapter 4, Rao reconstructs the practices of Chinatown Cantonese opera in North America in the context of traditions and changes in Cantonese opera in China during the 1920s. In addition, Rao introduces fundamental practices in three areas: Cantonese opera music (its orchestra and aural dimensions), origins of repertoire, and playbills. Chapter 5 provides a close examination of master performer Li Xuefang's performance of "Shilin Jita" (Shilin Paying Respects to the Pagoda), a fanxian erhuang slow-metered aria. Rao illustrates the master performer's creativity and improvisational skills and discusses use of the sliding tones as a powerful dimension of Li's performance and expression. Part 3 includes chapters 6–8, paying attention to Pacific Northwestern connections. In chapter 6, Rao reconstructs the picture of Cantonese opera in British Columbia, Canada, from 1910 to the early 1920s, with Victoria and Vancouver as the two centers of Chinatown theatre. Chapter 7 chronicles the San Francisco-based Lun On Company and Lun Hop Company during 1922–1925. These critical years witnessed increased attention from the general public; star performers from China; the broadening of repertoire featuring warrior roles and new operas; the publication of aria anthologies; and the grand opening of San Francisco's Great China Theatre. Chapter 8 presents the Great China Theatre in its heyday from 1926 to 1928. As one of the finest Cantonese opera houses, it hosted star performers, top dramatists, leading instrumentalists, and scene painters. It presented a novel, balanced, and comprehensive repertoire appealing to various audiences, housed new sets and lighting effects aided by modern technology, expanded its influence through firm bonds with the Oriental Record Company, and nurtured the participation of new generations of native-born Chinese Americans. Part 4 includes two chapters focusing on the Mandarin Theatre, also in San Francisco. Chapter 9 recounts its early years during 1924–1926, as the powerful rival of the Great China Theatre. Surviving early staffing challenges caused by the limiting immigration policies, the theatre established its strengths in young belle type operas. Soon after the increased...

The Myth of the Artist in George Morland’s Studio

The Myth of the Artist in George Morland’s Studio Francesca Bove (bio) The Artist in His Studio with His Man Gibbs is the last image that George Morland, the celebrated eighteenth-century painter of rural scenes, painted of himself (fig. 1, circa 1802). The canvas stands out amongst other British self-portraits of the period for the unusual importance it gives to the setting of the painter’s activity. A disheveled Morland is here surrounded by various objects alluding to both his art and his dissolute lifestyle. The visit to the artist’s painting room, a cliché of much Old Master self-portraiture,1 seems here to be reversed into a parody: Morland’s studio appears as the cold and squalid attic which (as one of his obituaries would put it) “served him for every purpose.”2 The impenetrable eyes and shadowy expression which were by now conventionally accepted to indicate a condition of artistic melancholy become a dumb look and a pathetic grimace, as Morland looks over his shoulder at us, showing no interest in greeting his guests.3 Similarly, the high seriousness of art is diminished by its juxtaposition with cooking: the artist at the easel is mirrored by his servant Gibbs at the stove, as if painting was a mere means of fulfilling physical necessities. This article explores Morland’s studio in this self-portrait as a crucial site for the construction of his artistic personality. In describing his art as the direct expression of his imagination, his lifestyle as outrageously bohemian, and himself as a painter disinterested in material rewards and misunderstood [End Page 151] by the cultural establishment, willing to sacrifice his life for the love of art, Morland invented an extremely modern persona and recommended to posterity his own myth. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. George Morland, The Artist in His Studio with His Man Gibbs, circa 1802. Oil on canvas. 63.5 × 76.2 cm. Image courtesy of Nottingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) had passed away a decade earlier, but his towering figure still offered the model of the ideal artistic personality for Morland’s contemporaries. This was not surprising, given that Reynolds had been the most successful British artist of his age, the leading figure of contemporary artistic debates, and the author of a large number of self-portraits diffused through print. In his Discourse VI, he had stated: “The purport of this discourse…is, to caution you against that false opinion, but too prevalent among artists, of the imaginary powers of native genius, and its sufficiency in great works.”4 As President of the Royal Academy, an institution founded on the idea that art could be taught, Reynolds had promoted the image of the morally-impeccable intellectual artist, whose [End Page 152] refinement was the product of a solid academic education based on the imitation of exemplary artworks. Consistent with these views, Reynolds’s self-portraits frequently stressed his status as man of letters and his achievement of an elevated social position.5 In their outward appearance, Morland’s earlier self-portraits had adhered to this vision of the artist: here he described himself as a polite and elegant individual in full control of his mental faculties.6 Nevertheless, these earlier self-portraits already subtly transgressed Reynolds’ model by stressing the sitter’s sensibility and imagination, indicating that Morland saw art as the spontaneous and original product of his interiority rather than the derivative output of academic knowledge. The rules governing the London art world at the turn of the nineteenth century were indeed distant from those that Reynolds had promoted through the Royal Academy, despite the changes that the very existence of this institution had wrought both in artistic production and among artists as a professional class. The establishment of regular public art exhibitions meant an increasing pressure for painters to produce original works that could stand out from crowded walls and cater to a newly enlarged audience.7 Artists were therefore increasingly compelled to pursue expressiveness rather than imitation.8 Simultaneously, the painterly profession was distancing itself from other artistic endeavors with more practical aims, and painters...

Path, place, and pace in mid-Ming Suzhou landscape painting

Path, place, and pace in mid-Ming Suzhou landscape painting

El Arte del Poder Monárquico: Cuentos Sacados de Cerámica Pintada

La cerámica clásica maya pintada representa una fuente valiosa de información acerca de la composición física, social, política y psicológica de la corte real maya. Las escenas pintadas de las vasijas proveen detalles de los componentes idealistas y de la naturaleza jerárquica de la corte, proporcionando una oportunidad única para estudiar la vida aristocrática maya y de los cargos monárquicos y sobre los individuos históricos quienes dirigían la sociedad antigua como personalidades únicas en vez de personas sin cara de un pasado distante.

Painting a Backdrop: Scene Painting and Digital Media

This article examines the collaboration between the scenic designer and scenic artist during the process of painting a scenic backdrop. This craft has traditionally been supplemental to the scenic designer’s artistic vision, and this hierarchy has served to maintain it at an artisanal level. A shift to more industrial stagecraft practices, and the use of digital tools for visualization and fabrication, inadvertently undermine the traditional authority of the designer based on artistic authority. The experiences of the scenic artist when faced with interpreting digital images of set designs are telling of the occupational identities of those who practice this craft, and current struggles to adapt to changing working conditions. These changes are also contingent on out-sourcing, which can mean the geographical separation between craft work and design work in a globalized entertainment industry.

Art in Science: The Artist and The Disease: The Exemplary Cases of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Art in Science: The Artist and The Disease: The Exemplary Cases of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Stevens v. Frost

Stevens v. Frost Joshua Kotin 1 OVER THEIR LONG and parallel careers, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost published poems in the same issue of a magazine only once—the first issue of The Measure: A Journal of Poetry in March 1921. Stevens’ contribution, “Cortège for Rosenbloom,” appeared in the middle of the issue, and was reprinted in the Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921 and Year Book of American Poetry and in Harmonium (1923). Frost’s contribution, “The Aim Was Song,” concluded the issue and was reprinted in New Hampshire (1923).1 When read together, yet outside the context of the magazine, the poems seem to stage a philosophical debate. Stevens claims that the human world and natural world are distinct and irreconcilable. Frost claims that the human world and the natural world are complementary. The debate seems readymade for the classroom. Stevens v. Frost. Who wins? Conventional readings of both poems corroborate this description of the debate. In “Cortège,” Stevens examines two responses to death—a funeral procession and poetry—and finds them lacking. In the poem’s first three stanzas (of eight total), he mocks the procession: Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead And his finical carriers tread, On a hundred legs, the tread Of the dead. Rosenbloom is dead. They carry the wizened one Of the color of horn To the sullen hill, Treading a tread In unison for the dead. Rosenbloom is dead. The tread of the carriers does not halt [End Page 81] On the hill, but turns Up the sky. They are bearing his body into the sky. (“Cortège” 10) The procession is grotesque. “[C]arriers” connotes “contagion” and “carrion.” “[H]undred legs” conjures a centipede. The unified, constant tread is a mark of groupthink. The procession cannot comprehend the truth: “Rosenbloom is dead”—and will not ascend to heaven. Eleanor Cook identifies “Cortège” as one of Stevens’ “antiheaven poems” (100). Jahan Ramazani agrees, claiming that the poem is an attack on “institutional mourning”: “Attacking institutional mourning, Stevens ridicules the denial of death not only in religious custom but also in the elegy’s formal apotheosis—the translations of Dido, Adonais, Arthur Hallam, and many others into the sky’s latest stars” (574). These interpretations accord with Stevens’ own comments about “Cortège.” In a letter to William Stanley Braithwaite about the poem in 1921, Stevens laments the difficulty of representing death: “From time immemorial the philosophers and other scene painters have daubed the sky with dazzle paint. But it all comes down to the proverbial six feet of earth in the end” (L 223). Yet Stevens does not exempt himself from ridicule. (Yvor Winters describes Stevens’ tone throughout Harmonium as “self-ridicule” [443].) In the seventh (and penultimate) stanza, Stevens imagines a poem that would accurately represent death: To a jabber of doom And a jumble of words Of the intense poem Of the strictest prose Of Rosenbloom. (“Cortège” 11) This “intense poem / Of the strictest prose” is not the poem we are reading—and not a poem Stevens is able to write. For it would be a poem that captures death—not another’s death or even the experience of dying, but death itself. This aspect of the natural world—the noumenal, the real—is inaccessible. The only alternatives to “dazzle paint” are mere fact (“Rosen-bloom is dead”) and clichés (“the proverbial six feet of earth”). As if anticipating the contents of The Measure, Stevens concludes the fifth stanza with a description of the procession treading “In a region of frost, / Viewing the frost” (10). A mere eleven pages later, Frost appears—with a sixteen-line poem about the compatibility of the human world and natural world. “The Aim Was Song” opens: [End Page 82] Before man came to blow it right The wind once blew itself untaught And did its loudest day and night In any rough place where it caught. Man came to tell it what was wrong. It hadn’t found the place to blow; It blew too hard: the aim was song; And listen—how it ought to go. (“Aim” 22) The narrative is simple. The wind blows harshly and arbitrarily...

Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter & Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family by Lucy Freeman Sandler

Reviewed by: Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter & Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family by Lucy Freeman Sandler Anne Rudloff Stanton Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter & Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family. By Lucy Freeman Sandler (London and Toronto: The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. xxi, 383, 240 ills. $70. ISBN 978-0712357579.) During the fourteenth century, Pleshey Castle in Essex was the locus of a remarkable confluence of patrons, artists, and scribes. The patrons were members of the wealthy and prominent Bohun family, and two of the artists, John de Teye and Henry Hood, were Augustinian friars attached to their household. During the second half of the century, the illuminators and scribes at Pleshey produced a number of profusely-decorated manuscripts, of which twelve complete or fragmentary examples remain as witnesses to a large and coherent group. In Illuminators and Patrons, Lucy Freeman Sandler places a prayerbook made for the last male Bohun in the context of this important group. The first part of Illuminators and Patrons addresses the historical background of the Bohuns and their artists, and surveys the surviving manuscripts (pp. 1–36; see also the appendix pp. 346–49). Sandler then turns to the titular manuscript, a psalter and hours now in the British Library (MS Egerton 3277), which here receives its first full scholarly description and analysis. She argues that the unusual organization and subject matter of this prayerbook was informed by the synergy of patron and illuminator at Pleshey. Here, as in other Bohun manuscripts, each verse begins with a historiated initial that contains a tiny painted scene. These initials provide the engaged reader with visual narratives drawn primarily from the Bible, which proceed along their own course in a way that sometimes dovetails with but is never captioned by the devotional texts. While Sandler’s overview of the illumination program explores the structure and the context of these paintings (pp. 37–91), her analyses of each of the illuminations in the next chapter are the heart of [End Page 125] this part of the book. Here, Sandler explores the interplay between the texts, the biblical initials, and the other figural imagery that was painted in marginal complexes outside the “primary” material (pp. 92–158). The complex and literate relationships between these different elements are suggestive of the relationships between the original readers and some of the artists, particularly John de Teye. Illuminators and Patrons is the culmination of three decades of work by Lucy Freeman Sandler, the doyenne of fourteenth-century English manuscript studies, who since 1985 has published several shorter articles on various aspects of the Bohun manuscripts as well as a monograph on one of the psalters. Several of these are republished in the second part of this book, updated and furnished with more color reproductions. This is a valuable compilation of both easily-available journal articles and essays that can be harder to track down. Presented here in a thematic organization, these studies present additional overviews of the group and its historiography, and either address themes, like political imagery, across several manuscripts (pp. 179-202), or individual members of the Bohun group, like the psalter in Vienna (ÖNB cod. 1826*; pp. 290–306). Illuminators and Patrons, like the manuscripts it discusses, is a copiously illustrated book, but it also includes a CD that provides images of every folio from Egerton 3277 in files large enough to allow close inspection of the texts and images. The manuscript is, at this writing, fully digitized at the British Library website (http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Egerton_MS_3277), but the disk is a more convenient adjunct to the analyses in the book. This volume, in conjunction with Sandler’s study of The Lichtenthal Psalter and the Manuscript Patronage of the Bohun Family (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2004) provide by themselves an essential library on this unusual group of illuminated manuscripts, and will no doubt provide an important foundation for further studies. Anne Rudloff Stanton University of Missouri Copyright © 2017 The Catholic University of America Press

Monkeys, Wasps and Gods: Graphic perspectives on Middle Horizon and later pre-Hispanic painted funerary textiles from the Peruvian coast

This paper examines the iconography of a group of pre-Columbian Andean woven textiles that, under the cloak of apparent heterogeneity, often hides a common thematic structure. It was widespread among pre-Columbian societies of the coast to individualise their art by applying thematic variations to the images they painted on cotton textiles: graphic compositions of a standing figure surrounded by a symmetrical arrangement of monkeys, felines and birds. Used as funerary shrouds to enclose the corpse after death, the woven textiles and their iconography performed the transformation of the recently deceased person into his new afterlife entity.The presupposition of our presentation is that the painted scenes were inspired by mythological references. They present a journey that the deceased must undertake to achieve immortality. Others have already completed the journey and, as major mythological heroes, they are still visible as celestial bodies, having triumphed in their battle against the stars for immortality. Their alternate diurnal and nocturnal presence can still be seen today.By carrying out an iconographical analysis based on contemporary Lowland mythology gathered in Colombia, in which this celestial antagonism is presented, we propose to find the homogeneity in these variations. Our aim is to bring new light to the reason for their presence as images on the mortuary materials of pre-Hispanic coastal societies.

The Painted Home as Heritage: Fanny Brate and the Home at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

SummaryThis article brings attention to the Swedish painter Fanny Brate’s paintings of domestic and family scenes from the turn of the nineteenth century. Brate is an artist who has been both marginalised by art history writing and museum curating and the creator of a body of work that has engrained a Swedish psyche. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, her art has resurfaced on the art market and museum walls. Brate’s paintings capture a key moment in cultural history and heritage: the Swedish home with a light blond décor and blissful family life. In this article, Brate’s work and its reception over the twentieth century is compared to her contemporary Carl Larsson's related painterly themes, a comparison which unravels values and politics that have caused her relative marginalisation. What is of interest in this article is how representations of domestic environments have different receptions partly due to the gender of the artist and further, how this theme can cast some light on the complex relationship between canon formation and cultural heritage processes.

Equidistant Intervals in Perspective Photographs and Paintings.

Human vision is extremely sensitive to equidistance of spatial intervals in the frontal plane. Thresholds for spatial equidistance have been extensively measured in bisecting tasks. Despite the vast number of studies, the informational basis for equidistance perception is unknown. There are three possible sources of information for spatial equidistance in pictures, namely, distances in the picture plane, in physical space, and visual space. For each source, equidistant intervals were computed for perspective photographs of walls and canals. Intervals appear equidistant if equidistance is defined in visual space. Equidistance was further investigated in paintings of perspective scenes. In appraisals of the perspective skill of painters, emphasis has been on accurate use of vanishing points. The current study investigated the skill of painters to depict equidistant intervals. Depicted rows of equidistant columns, tiles, tapestries, or trees were analyzed in 30 paintings and engravings. Computational analysis shows that from the middle ages until now, artists either represented equidistance in physical space or in a visual space of very limited depth. Among the painters and engravers who depict equidistance in a highly nonveridical visual space are renowned experts of linear perspective.

King Jeongjo's Patronage of Kim Hong-do

Abstract The eighteenth-century Korean painter Kim Hong-do 金弘道 (1745–ca. 1806) still dazzles today's viewers with his paintings of genre scenes and Daoist immortals, just as he astonished his contemporaries with his talent and versatility. Although he had numerous patrons, none had as much impact on his art as King Jeongjo 正祖 (r. 1776–1800). By examining written records and Kim's extant paintings, this paper explores and assesses the significance of King Jeongjo's patronage in unlocking the opportunities that enabled Kim Hong-do to reach his full potential as the most versatile painter in Korea.

Ponzo’s Illusion in 3D: Perspective Gradients Dominate Differences in Retinal Size.

A common form of the Ponzo illusion involves two test probes of equal size, embedded in a planar linear perspective painting depicting a three-dimensional (3D) scene, where the probe perceived to be farther is judged to be larger than the probe perceived closer to the viewer. In this paper, the same perspective 3D scene was painted on three surfaces: (a) A 2D surface incongruent with the 3D painted scene (flat perspective). (b) A 3D surface with a geometry congruent with the 3D scene (proper perspective). (c) A 3D surface with an opposite depth arrangement to the 3D scene (reverse perspective). This last stimulus was bistable and could be perceived veridically, as it physically existed, or as a depth-inverting illusion. For all experiments, observers relied on perspective gradients to estimate the size of a test probe placed within the scene; objects placed in a ‘far’ position as defined by perspective cues were perceived to be larger regardless of their physical distance. Further, illusion strength was tied to retinal size; small retinal-size differences (Experiments 1 and 2) did not affect illusion strength, whereas larger retinal-size differences (Experiment 3) did play a minor role.